Hi, I am very new to arduino and electronics, I have this issue with a project of mine.

I have a flash blob detection program that sends data to Processing which then passes to an Arduino mega 2560. The Arduino then gives out orders to 36 Futaba S3001 servos. The servos will need to point at specific degrees based on the data received, which is within 0-180.

For 18 of the servos, it just needs to swing back and forth, I just need to send it an on/off, but the other 18 servos I need to send 3-digit numbers to give them a specific angle to point at. Which means I need to send around 18x3 (3-digit number each) plus 18x1 (1-digit for on/off as 'T' or 'F') which is 72 characters each time.

I tried it out with 10 servos, but to prevent data drop, I had to give it a pretty large delay for it to pack up the characters before it does anything, so the feedback of the servos were really choppy. It even just stopped working after a while.

I got the first 16 (we changed it from 18 to 16) servos to work with no problem, however the other 16 servos are not working the way they should, they just kind of wobble a bit randomly and I can't figure what seems to be the problem.

They are supposed to sweep from 30 degrees to 160 degrees if I give them a "1" and just stop if I give them a "0", but either just shaking a bit at random times or just flat out not move at all.

One way to manage this kind of problem is to separate at the message handling from the control logic and servo control. That would make it easier to print debug messages to see if you are sending the right commands to the servos.